Wearable movement sensors have the potential to revolutionize clinical status and wellness assessments in routine healthcare. Monitoring a patient’s movements can be used to identify, measure, and keep track of their physical handicap, as well as to identify any deterioration and signal a therapeutic response in situations when direct contact is banned, such as those connected with Covid-19-related seclusion. Remote patient assessment may also enable more cost-effective monitoring and offer advantages. In 2011, Xsens announced the first generation MTw, a small wireless inertial-magnetic motion tracker built specifically for extremely precise ambulatory 3D kinematic applications in response to this industry’s demands. The second generation MTw Awinda was released in 2016. Since there is no longer a requirement for tracker-host and inter-tracker cabling, these wireless motion trackers only require the motion trackers themselves to be worn on the body. All motion trackers use the Awinda Master (station or USB dongle) attached to a recording PC to transfer their data to the PC wirelessly. (2)

Xsens created and patented an entirely new signal-processing pipeline, which was then incorporated into their wireless motion-tracking product, the MTw Awinda. In contrast to conventional signal processing pipelines, which suffer from performance degradation when the output rate is reduced, Xsens created the Strap-Down Integration (SDI) method, which ensures excellent accuracy in dynamic settings regardless of output data rate.

The MTw Awinda sensor (henceforth referred to as “MTw”) offered by XSENS is an inertial-magnetic measurement unit (IMMU) comprised of five devices(4): a normal accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a magnetometer, in addition to a barometer and a thermometer, to provide an autonomous self-calibration procedure every 60 seconds of use. In contrast to conventional inertial sensing systems, in which a reduced output rate leads to a loss of accuracy, XSENS created a so-called strap-down integration (SDI) algorithm that assures, in dynamic settings, a high level of accuracy regardless of the output data rate.(4)

The MTw Awinda comes with the MT Software Suite which includes the MT Manager Program and Kit for Software Development. The MT Manager Program is an intuitive graphical user interface that enables real-time viewing of 3D orientation and sensor data as well as recording and exporting of data to ASCII files (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) for additional analysis. (4)